Old Globe's world-premiere work is spare, sometimes static but still moving

There’s a paradox at the heart of “The Few”: A sense of unshakable loneliness amid an almost frantic clamor for connection.

That desolation finds voice in the many silences that permeate Samuel D. Hunter’s meditative play, which is receiving a sometimes static but ultimately affecting world-premiere production at the Old Globe.

To clarify, the silences are on the part of the people actually onstage: “The Few” takes its name from a tiny Idaho newspaper that caters to truckers, and the voice mails of patrons placing personal ads are sprinkled through the show.

The callers’ self-consciously cheery, chatty pitches (voiced mostly by San Diegans who answered an open Globe audition) stand in bold relief to the way the three people onstage, who evidently are just as desperate to find solace in each other, can’t or won’t take even the most tentative steps to make that happen.

From the moment Bryan (Michael Laurence) shows up in the paper’s offices at the top of the play, it’s clear there’s an agonized history and a few truckloads of tension between him and QZ (Eva Kaminsky), his ex who now runs the operation.

Bryan split without notice four years before, not long after the death of their third partner, Jim. But he still owns the business, and QZ seems as infuriated by his return as by his absence.

Meantime, she has brought aboard the local kid Matthew (Gideon Glick) to help run the paper. Matthew, it happens, was (maybe a bit implausibly) a major fan of The Few in its original incarnation as a kind of literary meetinghouse for truckers. Like those the paper catered to, he drew a sense of community from its pages that fed his own hunger for belonging.

To Bryan, those early days of the paper “felt like we were doing something important, something that mattered.”

But QZ, who has turned The Few almost exclusively into an ad vehicle, counters that “people needed to realize this was just cheap group therapy and they needed to get on with their lives.”

The play, Hunter’s first produced work since the off-Broadway success of his drama “The Whale,” unspools with a series of revelations that are best not divulged here. Along the way, the piece, set in 1999 (which might help explain why people are still delivering their ad copy via voicemail), plumbs the struggles of people living on the economic fringes.

Under the direction of Hunter’s frequent collaborator Davis McCallum, the one-act, 95-minute show works its way to a compelling emotional crescendo, but feels as though it spins its wheels early on. Some of the characters’ choices late in the piece also seem at odds with what we’ve learned about them.

The acting is admirably tuned to the show’s flow, though. As Bryan, the lean and shambling Laurence rations his speech so rigorously he could make a mime seem loquacious, and his sighs hint at a deep well of weariness and regret.

The nervous energy that drives Glick’s Matthew adds satisfying contrast and humor (although his soft voice made some lines hard to decipher), and the way he seems to end every sentence with a question mark underlines a nagging sense of the tentative in his life.

And Kaminsky, who was a marvel of offhand audacity in the Globe’s “Good People” last year, conveys a searing disappointment and resentment as QZ, whose dreams seem to have shrunken into a noose around her neck.

One line she utters amid the ragtag jumble of Dane Laffrey’s office-trailer set, as she ponders a stack of letters she and Bryan once wrote to each other, captures beautifully the idea of romanticized ideals running smack into a Mack truck of reality: